Kitchen Strategy

I recently moved into a house that I’m sharing with another person. Specifically, I mean that I’m renting rooms in a house that someone else owns. The person has lived in this house for about seven years and organization is not his strong suit.

Actually I think he’s the kind of person that really likes for things to be organized but doesn’t have the attention span or adequate interest in making the organization happen.

So when I moved in, I was given free reign to reorganize however I wanted to. It took me a bit of time to believe that the homeowner was serious about that. I also had a couple of false starts.

In one of my organizing sprees, I moved a bunch of things that I had been told not to move. I didn’t remember that I had been told not to move those things. What I did wasn’t malicious or intending to assert my own control. Nevertheless, my moving the things I had been told not to move caused the homeowner great distress. I understood why after he explained it and I felt very badly about doing that and causing him so much stress.

It was an education in how to go forward in the reorganizing and moving of things around his house. I understood at the point that some things I needed to be very careful about in how I moved them and what I did with them.

The kitchen needed a lot of reorganizing. I went through the kitchen and reorganized the cabinets and the drawers and then put up sticky notes on the fronts of the cabinets and drawers with the contents written on them. The idea was that while we were all learning where things were in their new places, that the sticky notes would reduce the guesswork.

So this article is about how to organize a kitchen.

Your main traffic area in the kitchen as a cook is the area between the sink and the stove and the fridge.

So when you’re thinking about what to put where, you want to put your most often used items—both food items and utensil type items—close to that triangle area.

I put the pans close to the oven in the base cabinet. I also put small appliances in a corner base cabinet close to the oven. Utensils for cooking are in drawers that flank the oven with some in crocks on top of the counter.

The wall cabinets above the stove and around the microwave contain all food items. The bottom shelves are soups, honeys, peanut butter, teas, and coffee. The second shelves up contain pastas and canned goods. The top shelf contains cereals, proteins, and bulk items.

The corner cabinet close to the stove contains spices on the bottom shelf, oils, vinegars and the like on the second shelf, and more bulk items on the top shelf.

The wall cabinet to the right of the sink contains mugs and glasses on the bottom shelf, more glasses on the middle shelf, and on the top shelf, wine glasses and miscellaneous glassware.

The wall cabinet to the left of the sink contains large plates and small plates on the bottom shelf, bowls on the second shelf, and larger bowls and miscellaneous ceramics on the top shelf.

In the cabinet next to that there is coffees, candles, and cookbooks, all in the wall cabinet over the coffee pot and the Keurig.

To the left of the sink is a base cabinet that contains baking supplies and snacks. Next to that a base cabinet contains large pans, bowls, and casserole dishes. Over from that is the base cabinet that contains storage containers and baking pans.